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Oppo F5, Vivo V7+’s Rival: How Does It Stack Up?

‘Capture the Real You’, a tagline synonymous with the brand. Oppo is a brand that prides itself on its cameras and markets them heavily.

As a matter of fact, the camera is marketed so heavily by the brand that it has had a good amount of success with people looking for a camera-centric smartphone. However, Oppo’s biggest competitor in the Indian scene is Xiaomi and its own sister brand Vivo, and they both have incredibly strong contenders across a range of price brackets.

Oppo recently launched the F5 which is their brand new device keeping in line with the ideology of their previous devices.

It is a direct competitor to the Vivo V7+ and the Mi A1. Like all previous devices, it too is a camera-centric smartphone and is marketed as such. So how does the F5 differentiate itself from the competition? Let’s find out in this in-depth spec analysis.

Design and Display

Well to start, the Oppo F5 and the Vivo V7+ share identical body designs. They both have metal bodies and a big screen which incidentally happen of the same size more or less.

They are quite in terms of overall dimensions, too but the differentiating factor between the two is that the Oppo F5 has rounded edges in the corners of the display, more or less like the LG Q6. Also, another key differentiating factor is the shape of the fingerprint sensor which is a bit oval on the back of the Oppo and squared off at the back of the Vivo.

The fingerprint sensor is very fast and accurate. Other key differences include placement of cameras and the antenna lines on both the devices. Overall, the design is quite generic and doesn’t do much in the way to stand out.

The Oppo F5 also comes with a 5.99 inch LTPS-LCD display with a 1080p+ resolution which basically is 1080x2160 pixels. It dictates to about 402ppi which is really sharp and is considerably higher than Vivo V7+’s screen which has a low resolution of just 720p on its panel.

The display too is one of the best that you would find in this price bracket and has nice colors and contrast. However, the display in the Huawei Honor 9i remains the leader in this price bracket.

Performance

Now, this is one area where both the Oppo F5 and the Vivo V7 Plus undercut heavily. We can’t really tell why but both of these manufacturers seem reluctant to use better chips on their devices.

Where the Vivo V7+ came with a Snapdragon 450 SoC, the Oppo comes with a MediaTekHelio P23 Octa Core SoC. It is made using the 16nm fabrication process which isn’t very efficient as the FinFet 14nm chips from Snapdragon but these cost low too.

Other than that, these are power hungry chips and although it is faster than the Snapdragon 450, it isn’t really as efficient. Also, the embedded Mali G71-MP2 dual-core graphics chip doesn’t help with gaming either. General day-to-day performance is fine but heavy gaming is off the list.

It also has 4GB of included RAM which is quite standard for all devices across this price bracket.

Software

On the Software front, the Oppo F5 runs a heavily skinned version of Android called the Colour OS. It has Android 7.1.1 as its base, and the UI tries to mimic the UX of the iOS. This is a trend that really needs to stop because it’s just blatant copyright theft and points towards an inability to create a better UI on the company’s side.

In my opinion, Oppo should simply pay the royalty to Google and get stock android for its devices. But that aside, the color OS doesn’t have a lot of bloat for the Chinese version, and there are customisability options like applying custom themes and so on.

Camera and Storage

Now, this is the area which should, in theory, be the ultimate selling point for the F5 but I’ll argue otherwise, and this goes for the Vivo V7+ as well.

The Oppo comes with a 16MP primary camera with a CMOS sensor and an f/1.8 aperture. It is accompanied by a single tone LED flash. The camera is fairly okay but cannot come near the performance of the Honor 9i.

The colors are good, and we get a revamped camera app that can control various aspects of the camera. Also, the f/1.8 aperture enables a nice bokeh effect, but it isn’t as profound as the dedicated telephoto camera setup on the Honor 9i and the Mi A1.

Coming to the front, we have a 20MP shooter with an f/2.0 aperture and a large 1/2.8 sensor to accommodate for the loss for the dual camera setup with the F3. The Front camera is also good and takes good pictures across a range of lighting conditions.

However, the device has some glaring and serious flaws like no Image stabilization of any sort, no 4K video recording (courtesy of the Helio P23) and no dual tonne LED flash.

Storage wise, the device comes with 32 and 64 GB variants with the ability to expand it further to 256GB via an SD card.

Battery and Connectivity

The Oppo F5 gets a 3200mAh battery which is almost similar to the Vivo V7 plus. There is no fast charging support so charging up that battery might prove to be a lengthy process.

Connectivity wise, the Oppo F5 has already launched in India, and so it supports Indian network bands including 4G VOLTE. It also features Wi-Fi a/b/g/n 5GHz, Bluetooth v4.2, micro USB 2.0 (no USB type-C) and GPS with A-GPS.

Conclusion

It’s hard, to sum up, the Oppo F5. The biggest problem with this and the Vivo V5 plus is that both of them don’t feel special in any regard. Also, advertising the camera to cover up the Phone’s apparent lack of proper hardware is simply misleading.

Also, the omissions like no USB Type-C connector, No image stabilization, and lack of fast charging doesn’t supplement the phone in the least in this price bracket. The Oppo F5 price in India is approximately Rs.19,000-22,000of which there are a lot of other alternatives that you can check out. For more in-depth reviews,